More Commercials

Writing about the shoe store ad earlier today and then reading the comment that was posted underneath it got me thinking about a couple other commercials that have kind of always bugged me. Let’s go down memory lane a little bit here since these are both a few years old and I don’t think either of them air anymore. And I’m not sure if anybody outside of Canada will ever have seen these but that doesn’t make them any less stupid or disturbing, as you’ll soon see.

I remember quite a few years ago a literacy foundation started running a series of ads promoting adult education classes or something like that for people who couldn’t read. That in itself is a really good idea and I’m not against it in any way. But having said that I do think that perhaps the people writing the commercials should have thought about signing up based on their stupidity. In every one of these commercials there was always this one part at the end that just made me look at the TV and laugh and think what the fuck at the same time. The end of the commercial would come around and the announcer would say, and I’m pretty sure I’m remembering the exact quote here, “for more information on how you can get help, look in The Yellow Pages under learn. L E A R N.”

Read that quote again, I’ll wait. Hopefully by now you’ll realize just why that’s so funny, or at least dumb. First of all, these people can’t read, how are they going to know what they’re looking at and how is spelling it out for them going to help. It’s not like you can draw pictures of the letters or something like that and make it all make sense to them. And let’s say that you did manage to teach them how to find the word learn, there’s still the matter of them reading all of the other stuff under that heading and figuring out what the numbers are.

So now that we’ve established that it’s pretty unlikely that anybody signing up for the classes is going to do so completely on his or her own, let’s look at the other side of this. Anybody they get to look this stuff up for them is already going to know how to spell learn so it’s pretty much a waste of time to tell them how.

Ok, since I’m not really good at writing transitional material, let’s talk about hot dogs now, because that’s what the other commercial was about.

Again this one comes from a few years ago. Mapleleaf Foods started marketing something they were calling the 100 percent all beef all meat frankfurter. Catchy name isn’t it? But it’s not the name that makes the commercial or the product bad, it’s the slogan, which could arguably be the worst slogan in the history of advertising.

“The new Mapleleaf 100 Percent All Beef All Meat Frankfurter. Because all beef doesn’t always mean all meat.”

I swear on anything I could possibly swear on that I’m not making that up, that was their real slogan. Just makes ya wanna fire up the old BBQ right now doesn’t it? I honestly almost gave up hot dogs forever after I saw that commercial the first time and it didn’t get any easier to watch the other 15000 times I saw it either.

Ok, now I’m going to turn things over to you, the good people of the comment boards. Let’s try and move away from the recent retardedness and concentrate on fun things. Can you think of a commercial either past or present that had something either really funny or really stupid in it? Here’s a comment to get you started, submitted by somebody who didn’t leave a name.

That’s as bad as the H and R block commercial. they say your not a little fish in a big pond and they won’t treat you like one, they’ll treat you like awhale. Yeah, that’s what I want, to be treated like a whale. Thanks Guys.Anonymous | 03.26.04 – 11:53 am

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